Sunday, July 1, 2012

Have you ever gotten the error message that Revit can only be used in demo mode? You try to reactivate your license and the registation link is grayed out? After searching on the internet you find your only choice is to uninstall and reinstall? Of course, who has time to uninstall and reinstall their software for absolutely no reason.

Well, last Tuesday, one of our Reviteers had two sessions of Revit 2012 open. She closed one of them, went to lunch and when she came back, got the wonderful error that she could only run Revit in demo mode. Our VDC Director asked me to help see what the problem was. After the usual fiddling and then going down the Google dead end road which ends at reinstallville, an idea popped into my head.

Well, just before that idea, I was playing around with the CascadeInfo.cas file in C:\ProgramData\Autodesk\AdLM. There are a couple of websites with solutions to rename or delete it, but they were referring to network installations so that didn't do anything. Here's what happened next.

My idea was to go to another computer with the same software, in this case Building Design Suite Premium.

Go to another computer and find the following folder:

C:\ProgramData\Autodesk\AdLM

Copy the folder to a flash drive or your server.

Go to the sick computer.

Open C:\ProgramData\Autodesk\

Rename the AdLM folder to AdLMx

Paste the AdLM folder from the healthy computer to the sick computer.

Restart Revit and it should be working now.

You'd think something so simple would be found somewhere on the internet, but now it is.

Now, this only works if you have another computer with the same software loaded and activated.

Here's the bonus part. Make a backup of your AdLM folder in case this happens to you in the future.

I think it's the CascadeInfo file, but you can do what you want with it all. I'm not sure what happens if you have multiple programs installed, so be careful with all of this.

Also, you may want to backup C:\ProgramData\Autodesk\RAC 2012 just for the heck of it as well.

Of course, Autodesk's licensing sucks and this shouldn't happen in the first place but maybe 30 years from now, they'll figure out a way to make installing, activating and restoring their products easy.

Here's a link from Autodesk about the issue:
http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/ps/dl/item?siteID=123112&id=13894457&linkID=9240817